I’m reading random back issues of the New Yorker, and I happened to come across a profile of Gil Scott-Heron, who passed away last week. One of the things he said stuck in my mind.
“All the dreams you show up in are not your own.”
He’s commenting on the ways that we sometimes show up as bit players in other people’s dreams, but it got me thinking.
Even as we show up in other people’s dreams, it’s important that the dreams we’re living out are our own.
Other people’s dreams
Sometimes our dreams for ourselves get taken over by other people. I see this sometimes in the people I talk to who are struggling with academia.
Maybe academia started out as your own dream, but somewhere along the way it got taken over by someone else’s dream – your advisor, whose dream for you is an R1, when your dream for yourself was a regional teaching university; your institution, whose dream for you is the tenure-track when yours was just graduate school.
Living out someone else’s dream can lead to focusing on something you don’t much care about, delaying family decisions you desperately want because someone won’t approve, making choices based on someone else’s values instead of your own.
Whose dream are you living right now?
Live your own life
What is your dream for yourself? When you imagine your perfect life, what does it look like?
When you imagine that perfect life, do you experience yourself yearning for it? If not, figure out whose dream it is, then imagine your perfect life again. What does it look like now?
We’ll never be satisfied by living someone else’s dreams. That’s not to say we never compromise or work in partnership with others, especially our partners, because of course we do. But that’s about a larger dream we’re all in, not giving over ours for someone else’s.
All the dreams you show up in are not your own. But make sure the ones you’re aiming for are yours.
Not sure what your dreams are? Join me and Jo VanEvery in a six-week class designed to help you figure out what your possibilities are. Click here to find out more.
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